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White House Makes Moves to Bolster Gun Safety

WASHINGTON — Six months after the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn., and with no major gun legislation on the horizon in Congress, the White House is quietly moving forward on an executive package of gun safety measures.

The package, which includes 23 executive actions announced by President Obama earlier this year, is intended to bolster the nation’s database used for background checks and make it harder for criminals and people with mental illnesses to get guns.

Among other things, the executive orders relax health care privacy regulations that some state executives say prevent them from putting the names of those Americans with mental health records into the database. The orders also give states more money to help them add data to the system and compel federal agencies to share more mental health data on workers. The goal is to add thousands of new people into the database — those with a history of mental illness, for example — who would not legally be allowed to buy a gun under current law.

Gun control groups said that they admired the efforts, but that they would never carry the weight of legislation to expand the number of gun buyers who are subjected to the background check system. “Everything they have done helps,” said Mark Glaze, the director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns. “They are important and significant and will make a big difference, but the biggest reduction in gun violence will come when every American gets a background check.”

Photo

A customer in April at a New Milford, Conn., gun shop, which held a sale in anticipation of new state measures to curb guns.Credit
Wendy Carlson for The New York Times

This week, families from Newtown visited Capitol Hill to press for new legislation, while B. Todd Jones, Mr. Obama’s choice to head the embattled Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, endured a testy nomination hearing.

“We’ve only just finished round one in our fight to get Congress to pass common-sense measures to save lives, and we will continue to join 90 percent of Americans in calling on them to close loopholes in the background check system,” Denis McDonough, Mr. Obama’s White House chief of staff, said Wednesday in an e-mail. “But in the meantime, we are doing everything in our power without them — including strengthening the existing background check system.”

The administration’s progress enrages some Republicans and the National Rifle Association, which has aggressively fought any changes to gun laws. “The reason President Obama is using executive actions is to circumvent the will of the people and to bypass Congressional oversight,” said Andrew Arulanandam, a spokesman for the group.

The National Instant Criminal Background Check System, known as NICS, is a database made up of law enforcement, mental health and other records maintained by the F.B.I. to screen out prohibited firearms purchasers, including people with a record of felonies, those with active domestic violence protection orders lodged against them or those who have been involuntarily committed. The background check database contains more than 10 million active records, but states have been lax in some cases about uploading records to the system, particularly ones related to mental health.

Without an act of Congress, the administration is unable to significantly expand the number of gun buyers who are subject to background checks, nor curb certain types of weapons and clips, both central to Mr. Obama’s gun agenda. Those efforts failed in April on the Senate floor and have yet to be revived.

The executive orders also direct the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to begin research into gun violence, which administration officials and gun control groups say will help make the case for new gun safety regulations. During the gun debate this past spring on Capitol Hill, there was little available data about the reasons for gun violence, buying patterns and other gun-related public health issues. The reason is that Congress, under pressure from the gun lobby in the 1990s, redirected money that had been allocated for gun research by the C.D.C. and wrote legislation that was interpreted as a ban on government-financed studies of gun violence.

The Institute of Medicine, an independent nonprofit organization, released a 69-page report this month that recommended research on the characteristics of firearm violence, preventive strategies, gun safety technology and the role of video games and other popular media on gun violence. The Centers for Disease Control is now moving to study some of these areas.

Gun control groups say that the administration’s actions are the closest thing they have to rolling back two decades of an expansion in gun rights in both state legislatures and on Capitol Hill. “The simple act of saying we are no longer going to prohibit agencies from doing basic research on what happens when guns fall into the wrong hands and kill people is a sea change,” Mr. Glaze said. He also said that states had responded well when they had been given the resources and historically tended to respond well when they faced the risk of losing scarce funds. “There are a lot of people who are not in the system who should be,” Mr. Glaze said. Administration officials say that a few states, like Pennsylvania, have already started to increase entries in the database.

“As a group these efforts work in tandem,” said Sarah Bianchi, the director of economic and domestic policy for Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “But among the most important was expanding the background check system. There are different reasons some states don’t send all their records: resources, confusion about the law. We wanted to do everything we could to strengthen the system.”

Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, expressed dismay at the recent developments. “President Obama abused his power by imposing his administration’s policies through executive action instead of working with Congress and allowing the issue to be debated,” he said. “As a strong defender of the Second Amendment, I will continue to oppose the president’s attempts to undermine Americans’ constitutional right to bear arms.”

Next week Mr. Biden will speak to gun groups, his first public event on gun control since the failure of the Senate bill.

A version of this article appears in print on June 13, 2013, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: White House Makes Moves To Promote Gun Safety. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe